Twitter, IBM announce a new data analytics partnership

Just a few months after teaming up with Apple AAPL, Big Blue revealed its latest partnership on Wednesday — one with Twitter to launch a new venture that will package Twitter data with IBM’s cloud-based analytics and business consulting services.

In a joint press release, IBM IBM and Twitter TWTR said their partnership will provide a variety of cloud-based services, with data culled from Twitter users, to offer businesses a cultivated look at their customers’ behavior and opinions. IBM will also use the data analytics partnership to support its own consulting business, allowing the company to tailor those services to be specific to certain industries — from retail to finance.

In a blog post, Twitter vice president of data strategy Chris Moody wrote that the social media company often hears from companies looking to put Twitter data to use in their business plans and that Twitter’s “relationship with IBM will directly address this need by training tens of thousands of IBM Global Business Services consultants on the business applications for Twitter data, as well as the technical and organizational changes needed to effectively weave this important resource into day-to-day business operations.”

Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo said in a statement included in the companies’ announcement that the partnership “will change the way business decisions are made — from identifying emerging market opportunities to better engaging clients, partners and employees.” The company also pointed to its acquisition of social data company Gnip earlier this year as a move that paved the way for this data analytics partnership. Twitter says that Gnip gave it a platform to make “15 billion social activities per day” available for analysis by various business clients and partners.

“Twitter provides a powerful new lens through which to look at the world — as both a platform for hundreds of millions of consumers and business professionals, and as a synthesizer of trends,” IBM CEO Ginni Rometty said in a statement, adding that the partnership “is the latest example of how IBM is reimagining work.”

In July, IBM reached an agreement with Apple to partner on the development of 100 enterprise apps for the iPhone and iPad. Wednesday’s announcement with Twitter represents IBM’s latest shift toward enterprise services and away from its hardware business.

Correction, October 29, 2014: An earlier version of this article misstated Chris Moody’s title. He is vice president of data strategy at Twitter.

Ginni Rometty’s terrible, horrible (no good, very bad) day

Everybody expected IBM’s third-quarter earnings, reported early Monday morning, to be bad. They just didn’t expect them to be this bad.

In its tenth quarter of consecutive revenue decline, the tech giant IBM announced sales of $22.4 billion, down 4% from a year ago. Operating earnings, meanwhile, fell to $3.68 a share, down 10% in the same time period. On the heels of the dismal numbers, IBM’s shares tanked more than 7% on Monday.

The worse-than-expected news has put a lot of pressure on CEO Ginni Rometty, who was recently profiled in Fortune magazine (and, for the third year in a row, was No. 1 on Fortune’s Most Powerful Women list). Some have even called for her to step down. But, disappointing as IBM’s current numbers may be, that is unlikely to be the right antidote to the company’s ills.

“We are disappointed in our performance,” Rometty said in a press release issued along with the company’s earnings. “We saw a marked slowdown in September in client buying behavior, and our results also point to the unprecedented pace of change in our industry. While we did not produce the results we expected to achieve, we again performed well in our strategic growth areas—cloud computing, data and analytics, security, social and mobile—where we continue to shift our business. We will accelerate this transformation.”

Rometty has been on an accelerated path of transformation for over two years, divesting lagging businesses (as part of today’s announcement, IBM will offload its chip unit) and investing in higher-growth areas like mobile, cloud and cognitive computing. She—and the rest of IBM’s executive team—should have moved even faster into cloud infrastructure and software in particular.

To her credit, though, Rometty’s got plenty of believers inside the company. She has rallied and focused Big Blue around newer technologies and made some steady progress in that direction, partly by getting buy-in from IBMers. She has also done more outreach to the investment and startup communities than any previous CEO, and understands that in order to succeed, IBM needs to forge new partnerships and ecosystems.

Yes, the transformation is a slow one—after all, the company sells thousands of products and employs over 430,000 workers across the globe. And Rometty is unlikely to ever get IBM back to its former glory days—the world of technology has changed drastically in recent years. But that doesn’t mean anyone else could do a better job running and transforming today’s IBM. In fact, Rometty has many of the attributes needed to turn the massive company around: Familiarity and buy-in from the workforce coupled with an ability to break away from the past.

The one thing she doesn’t have? Lots of time. (For Wall Street, 10 quarters is an eternity.)

In a recent interview with Fortune, Rometty—unsurprisingly—demurred when asked how long it would take IBM to get back to revenue growth.

“My biggest focus is shifting to high value,” she said. “So, to me, growth is a question of mix [and] we’re already answering that out in the marketplace . . . So, for us, and our investors, what they’re really watching is that do we keep moving to higher value. Growth is, of course, important. But it is more important that we keep moving to high value. And in a time of transformation, you want to keep focusing on your transformation and that you grow the right parts of the business. That’s the most important thing.”

I never asked for a raise, and it paid off

And as much as the flap over Microsoft MSFT CEO Satya Nadella’s off-hand comment about women and pay (“It’s not really about asking for a raise, but knowing and having faith that the system will give you the right raise.”) fascinates me, I’ve felt the need to tear my hair out.

Give the guy a break—because I think he may be right.

Women, in particular, may blast me for saying this, but hear me out. I’m entering the fourth decade of my career at Fortune, and for much of that time I was underpaid. It was the price loyalty: I started out as a 24-year-old newbie and stayed loyal, while hotshot job-hoppers with big-money demands got recruited to come over and scored bigger paychecks than mine. “You really should talk to the higher-ups,” a couple of close colleagues, including richly compensated guys, kindly said to me. I thanked them and ignored their advice.

Why? Because I respected that budgets were tight, and better for the long-term value of my company—and my own career—if we hired the best people…and it’ll all work out in the end.

That’s what I told myself. Actually, I cared little about money (ironic, working for Fortune), had enough to be happy (being unmarried without kids allows that), and secretly looked down on super-successful people who worked just for big bucks. (Lacking envy of Wall Street honchos, tech billionaires and other rich people is a distinct advantage for a business writer.)

I refused to care about money. And it drove my friends crazy.

Meanwhile, as a co-founder of Fortune Most Powerful Women in 1998, I started to notice that many female CEOs, including IBM’s IBM Ginni Rometty, questioned their readiness for promotions at some stage, shied from career risk, and viewed success horizontally—they sought broad influence—vs. vertically climbing the ladder. Years before Facebook FB COO Sheryl Sandberg turned into the Oprah of career advice-giving, I wrote about women navigating their careers more warily than men. And early this year, when I innocently asked General Motors GM CEO Mary Barra if she ever asked for a raise, and she said “No,” I felt fortified—the GM chief, my spiritual sister.

Not that I didn’t advocate for myself. I climbed the Fortune masthead, from reporter to writer to senior writer, while occasionally subverting the system. Once when I was offered a promotion from senior writer to editor at large (a cryptic title awarded to veteran writers), with no boost in pay and no new responsibilities; I turned it down. I told my boss that I thought the title was unnecessary.

Call me stupid. I wanted to be rewarded for bona fide contributions.

My big Lean In moment came two years ago when I went to my boss, then-Editor Andy Serwer, and told him that I wanted—seriously, I was dying to—take on broader work within Time Inc., Fortune’s parent company. I told Andy that I’d keep supporting Fortune and Most Powerful Women, but I needed to do more. He backed me. And when I met with the top brass at the company, they asked for a job description. I wrote it, and I never mentioned money.

I got what I asked for: a new position developing conferences and other live content not only for Fortune but other Time Inc. magazines as well. I also got what I didn’t ask for: an increase in pay that was bigger than I ever would have expected. A lot more. Had I asked for a specific amount, I’d be earning less than I am today.

I’m not sure what the lesson is, except not asking for a raise worked out well for me. Fortune Broadsheet writer Caroline Fairchild yesterday quoted Kellogg Professor Vicky Medvec, an expert on negotiating whom I’ve come to know well. “You never ask for more money,” Medvec advises. “You ask for more of a package. As you go into a negotiation, you always make it about what you’re achieving for the business. The compensation should be the caboose of the offer. It is just along for the ride.”

For me, my raise was a nice caboose. And the money came with a good ride.

“From the MPW Co-chairs” is a daily series where the editors who oversee the Fortune Most Powerful Women brand share their insights about women leaders.

IBM’s Rometty: ‘Growth and comfort don’t coexist’

Ginni Rometty wasn’t afraid to get a little introspective in front of her high-powered peers. “Growth and comfort don’t coexist,” she said, smiling. “That’s true for people, for companies, for nations.”

Speaking at Fortune‘s Most Powerful Women Summit in Laguna Niguel, Calif. on Tuesday, IBM’s chief executive clearly had transformation on her mind. Earlier this year, her smile was plastered all over newsstands with the cover line, “Can IBM Ever Be Cool?” (That would be the Oct. 6 issue of Fortune, of course.) Later this month, she and her team will release the company’s latest financial results with the hope that the figures will demonstrate a continued turnaround for the 113-year-old technology company, one in which it turns its back on businesses that served it well for decades and toward new ones focused around so-called cloud computing.

“Every generation gets to reinvent the company,” she recalled saying to her team after she was named CEO in 2012. “This is our time.”

Rometty, for better or worse, has become the new face of change at IBM IBM. In front of an audience that included Clinique president Jane Lauder and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett, Rometty outlined why she divested $6 billion of IBM’s assets over the last two years in pursuit of a “higher-value” strategy that embraced mobile devices, data analytics, and, of course, the cloud.

“Something I ask myself every day is, ‘Did I make decisions or do things that only I can do?'” she said to her interviewer, Fortune senior writer Michal Lev-Ram. “If I’m doing things that someone else can do, then I’m wasting my time.”

She added: “Strategy is about deciding what you will do and what you won’t do.” That the statement was redundant didn’t seem to matter; saying it seemed to help the audience reconsider it.

Rometty, who admitted to having a penchant for series of three, then outlined her trio of rules for transformation.

The first: Never protect the past. “If you never protect the past, you’ll be willing to never love something so much you won’t let it go,” she said.

The second: Never define yourself by a product. “Or your competition either. If you live and define yourself by a product or competition, you’ll lose sight of who your customer is,” she said. “We don’t exist without them.”

And the last: “Relentless reinvention,” she said. “You kind of have the mindset of being a steward for the longterm.”

But how to instill a culture of transformation in one of the largest technology companies on the planet—one, at last count, with more than 430,000 employees? Education. Rometty, outlining a list (of three, naturally) of cyber security concerns she raises with clients, seemed to be sharing a list of corporate culture lessons, too.

“First off, internal is your biggest issue. Whatever you do, you’ve got to raise the I.Q. of your workforce. The key is, you train ‘em, you test ‘em, you keep trying to trick ‘em,” she said. “Second, you have to have a fast response team. Everyone will have a problem. Third, you have to protect your data. Don’t think of it as a home with alarms on all the windows. Assume bad things are inside.”

Rometty smiled again. “The greatest challenge for us all right now,” she said, “is the pace of change.”

The women who STEM-ed their way to power

One of my favorite days of the year at Fortune is MPW day, the day the list of Fortune‘s Most Powerful Women in business comes out. It’s a great celebration of women in power, of women in business generally, and of course it’s always great fun to see how the world reacts to the MPW team’s picks—who’s on, who’s off, who jumped to the top of the list, who fell, who’s brand-new. But beyond these highlights, one of the things I love is the general trends you can pick up by pulling the camera back and looking at how the list changes and evolves over the years.

One strong trend the entire MPW team has noticed over the years is the shift in industry makeup of those at the very top of the list. When Fortune first started the list, the top ranks were consistently held by women in creative fields, like advertising, media and publishing. In 1999—the second year Fortune published its MPW list — Carly Fiorina, then CEO of Hewlett-Packard HPQ, was the lone woman CEO in the male-dominated tech sector.

Cut to this year’s list: The women at the top of the list run the bluest of blue chip firms, the biggest industrial and technology giants, and some of the largest companies in the Fortune 500. Just look at the companies with their chief executives now represented in the top 10: IBM IBM. General Motors GM. Pepsi PEP. Lockheed Martin LMT. DuPont DD. Hewlett-Packard. Not one of the top 10 is in retail; not one is in media; not one is in marketing or advertising (not, of course, that there’s anything wrong with those industries, but the size of the companies is typically smaller and they are fields that traditionally have more women at the top).

The shift speaks volumes about how women’s roles have evolved in business and the kinds of milestones women are achieving in corporate America. (In addition to these corporate giants, we now have a woman running the Fed, a woman Secretary of Commerce, a woman at the helm of Time magazine. It would be nice if we could also have a woman pope and a female president of the United States, but at least one of those two things may not be that far away.)

Here’s another lesser-known commonality about the women at the very top of the list: almost all of them majored in seriously hard sciences. Let’s just tick down the list: IBM’s Ginni Rometty majored in computer science and electrical engineering. GM’s Mary Barra got a BS in electrical engineering. DuPont’s Ellen Kullman? Mechanical engineering (“mech e” in engineering shorthand). PepsiCo’s Indra Nooyi got her BS in physics, chemistry and math—not engineering per se, but a hat trick in STEM studies. HP’s Meg Whitman studied math and science then went into economics. A bit lower down on the list, Yahoo YHOO CEO Marissa Mayer majored in symbolic systems and got her masters in computer science; Xerox’sXRX Ursula Burns has a BS and MS in mechanical engineering. (Former Google executive GOOG Megan Smith is not on our list, but the newly-named chief technology officer of the United States has a BS and MS in mechanical engineering.)

One in seven engineers may be female, but engineers represent three of the top five spots on the MPW list. And while engineering may be the trend among the top ranks of the MPW list, plain old math and science is good too: Mondelez’s MDLZ Irene Rosenfeld holds a Ph.D. in marketing and statistics, Archer Daniels Midland’s ADM Pat Woertz studied accounting, Lockheed’s Marillyn Hewson and Facebook FB COO Sheryl Sandberg studied economics.

In fact, of the top 10 Most Powerful Women, only one was anything close to a liberal arts major: Fidelity president Abigail Johnson, who majored in art history at William Smith College. For everyone else, it’s STEM City.

What’s remarkable about this is that these women were choosing these fields of study decades ago. Right now, tech is the engine of our economy—coding is cool, and everyone has their eye on the riches that can come from the next hot tech idea. And even still, we have a paucity of young women and girls in STEM fields. But these women, encouraged by their passion, their talents, and in many cases parents who gave them the confidence to know they could achieve anything they wanted to—pursued their STEM passions of study at a time when it was far more rare, and it propelled each to the top of their fields.

I bring this up because it’s statistically exceptional (see, I can say that, even though I’m an English major) and generally remarkable. But also because I hope as the Most Powerful Women list grows even more and more powerful, and the number of women CEOs of Fortune 500 companies grows and grows and grows—25 now, up from 10 in 2006 and 2 in 2002 and one in 1997 (and she was co-CEO with her husband)— I hope young girls will look at these women as models of power and inspiration—and might emulate their path to success. If that’s the case, we’ll be that much closer to the day when the number of women CEOs on the Fortune 500 is too numerous to count—even for a math major.

“From the MPW Co-chairs” is a daily series where the editors who oversee the Fortune Most Powerful Women brand share their insights about women leaders.

You don’t need an MBA to be an MPW

Nearly half of the women on Fortune’s Most Powerful Women in Business list are CEOs, leading and in many cases transforming their companies. Despite the record number of women CEOs on this year’s list, more than half of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women are running their companies without a Master’s of Business Administration degree.

Only 18 women on Fortune’s list of the top 50 women in business attended a business school graduate program, Fortune found after compiling the education backgrounds of 49 women on the list (Ross CEO Barbara Rentler would not disclose her education information). IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, Archer Daniels Midland CEO Pat Woertz and newly-appointed Oracle co-CEO Safra Catz are among the women on this year’s list without the degree. Some, like Catz, did opt for other professional educations in the field of law. But as the cost of a professional degree comes under more and more scrutiny, it’s worth noting that some of Fortune’s MPWs opted against one–and did just fine.

Watch the reveal of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women List

Fortune Senior Editor at Large Pattie Sellers revealed the 2014 Most Powerful Women list on CBS This Morning on Thursday. She explained why IBM IBM CEO Ginni Rometty is No. 1 in the Fortune rankings — and how General Motors GM chief Mary Barra is seizing this period of crisis at the auto giant to transform a poisonous corporate culture. The remarkable ascension of one of Home Depot’s HD Anne-Marie Campbell, from cashier to Southern division president, captivated CBS Morning Show co-host Gayle King.

IBM CEO Ginni Rometty on leadership, challenges, and reinvention

When Virginia Rometty became chief executive of IBM IBM in 2012, she took control of a company that was took in more than $100 billion in annual revenue but was clearly facing an existential crisis as rapidly rising cloud computing technology threatened its core businesses.

Two years into her tenure, Rometty sat down with Fortune senior writer Michal Lev-Ram to discuss how Big Blue’s reinvention is progressing. (You can read the full story, which leads our Oct. 6 issue, here.) The interview below, portions of which we have also made available as video, has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Fortune: You’ve made a lot of big changes in a relatively short amount of time. Can you kind of walk me through the one or two top, boldest, biggest moves that you’ve made at IBM?

Ginni Rometty: Sure. Well, look, all of these changes are rooted in this belief that you’ve got to constantly reinvent yourself, and all the big changes have been around the major points of our strategy: around reinventing industries and professions for data, around remaking the enterprise era for cloud, and all around this theory of engagement.

If I picked one from each—some of the biggest, boldest—in the beginning of the year we launched Watson, built a whole new division around it, and dedicated over a billion dollars to it. This is really a great play for the long-term—for a whole world of not just artificial intelligence but beyond, and how we’re going to handle all of this data in a system that actually learns. It’s not programmed.

Then another big announcement we made in the area of cloud. On the heels of having acquired SoftLayer, we not only invested another billion dollars to deploy up to 40 data centers around the world—knowing what’s most important to the enterprise, where these should be placed, our cloud data centers—but the excitement was around something called BlueMix, which is a platform as a service to help the enterprise write new-wave applications for that world.

And then in the whole area of engagement, most recently, we announced our partnership with Apple.

We talked about some of the big technological shifts and transformations that are taking place now. What presents the biggest challenge to you and what’s the biggest opportunity? You’ve got social, mobile, cloud, big data.

I think the challenge and opportunity, ironically, it’s the same no matter what industry you’re in, not just the industry we’re in. So you see three big shifts in the market today: data, big data, and analytics; the advent of cloud and everything as-a-service; and this whole idea about mobility and one-on-one engagement.

What makes this time different is that the three of those things are happening at one time, at a speed we haven’t seen before. So you’re going to get a shift that’s faster and more profound. And it impacts every industry.

So when I talk to all of my colleagues in other industries, the same things we experience in reinventing our company are the same things they’re experiencing. You’ve got to keep reinventing. You’ll have new competitors. You’ll have new customers all around you. To me, those three together is what’s driving all of the change in the industry.

It seems like that would present kind of a double challenge for you. Your customers, historically and today, look to you for guidance. Do you feel that you’re under even more pressure than your customers to sort of see these transformations through and do it quickly?

You know, as part of being a company that is 100 years old, I think this is all about what continuous transformation is. I too feel, like any company, that’s how you’ve got to look at this. This constant reinvention. As I say to our own team: Never protect your past, never define yourself by a single product, and always continue to steward for the long-term. Keep moving towards the future.

I think those rules kind of apply to everyone. They apply to us in that some of the businesses we’re in, they’re mission-critical, they’re core franchises for clients. We keep changing and taking those clients to the future. It moves us to the future, it moves them to the future.

Do you think that you are under more scrutiny, under more pressure to deliver on some of those transformations that you’ve made because your customers look to you for that guidance?

Well, look, I think given who the IBM target company is, I feel our purpose is to be essential to our clients. We can’t declare it—only they can declare that—and that in and of itself puts you in a realm where you think very carefully about what you do and you take very seriously the value of it. You have to provide for them.

I feel we’ve taken that pretty seriously no matter what the time or change was, even now in constant change. There have been many shifts in this industry, and there will be many more. As long as you continually reinvent yourself, that’s what I think clients expect from us.

With all of these technological shifts—new technologies, new ways of working—the pool of competitors for you seems to have broadened. What companies, what shifts, keep you up at night?

It’s actually not a company that keeps me up at night because I believe the other thing is to never define yourself by competitors. You define yourself by either what your clients want or what you believe they’ll need for the future. So: Define yourself by your client, not your competitor.

What keeps me up at night is speed. Speed of transformation, continuing to move to that future. It’s always around doing this faster. You get it, test it, try it, move it, and make bold moves, whether that is around Watson, cloud, the partnership with Apple, or the announcement of a new platform for hardware that’s built for data and cloud.

Those are the things you just want to do to keep moving forward.

Some of your newer competitors are Amazon and Google, and Microsoft on the cloud side. In light of those, the SoftLayer acquisition, and some of the moves that you just described, what grade do you give yourselves? Where do you think you’re at? Are you on track for the goals that you’ve set for yourselves?

I am very pleased. You have to remember our competitors. We are in a big industry. They are varied, many, and over the years, they continue to change. In different parts of the business, they’re different.

How I measure myself is through IBM’s three big strategic areas. In the world of big data and analytics, we finished the year at $16 billion in analytics revenue. In the first half, it grew at 7%. In cloud, we finished last year at four-and-a-half billion, and again, growth was over 50%. In mobile, we had over 100% growth. In security, we had 20% growth.

So I measure myself by the areas in which we’ve chosen to play, by our growth, and our movement to high-value businesses in those areas. If you ask me, “So what is your business model?” Our business model’s always about shifting to higher value opportunities. For clients and thus for ourselves, and that’s what I know our shareholders expect for the long-term.

Is there something that IBM could have done prior to you becoming CEO that could have positioned you even further along today?

I’m the ninth CEO of IBM. Every one of my predecessors has steered through a technological shift, and every one left the company in a better position than the person before them, and prepared this company with a very strong balance sheet to allow it to continue to invest for the next shift.

Now, as we go through another set of transformations around these three big shifts of data, cloud, and engagement, that’s my job—to leave behind a company positioned even stronger for my successor, whenever that may be, than on the day I found it.

I feel very strong. That is the job of stewarding for the long-term, and that is certainly what has been ingrained in my mind as what part of my role is to do.

Is there something—like on the cloud side, for example—that you think could have happened faster before you became CEO?

Look, I was part of this company then. So I have no regrets, before or after. I take great responsibility and I think we’re well-positioned.

We’ve been working on cloud and data. You don’t get businesses of that size that fast if you haven’t been working on them for a long time. So I’m very pleased with the progress that the company has made over many years in these areas.

We talked about revenue growth earlier. What grade do you give yourself? Putting profit aside, just on the revenue side, are you happy with where you are? Could you do better?

When I think of revenue growth, I think of the words “mix” and “shift.” So the goals we’ve set for ourselves is to grow in the growth initiatives we’ve talked about all around data, cloud, and engagement, and continue to produce our sort of report card on those. And again, in the first half of the year, we saw another set of strong double-digit growth in those things.

Then we do work that’s what I call core franchise work, mission-critical work for clients. My job is to continue to innovate inside of that. Every one of us has challenges to work on to address those.

When you take a look at our growth, I divide it in those kinds of buckets. And the most important thing I do on growth is continue to shift to higher value businesses, and make the right decisions I have to for that.

There will be times you make decisions that actually detract from growth. Obviously we’ve done some very important divestitures that will be better suited in others’ hands, and that’ll take away from the bottom line. On the other hand, we’re strongly investing in these growth areas.

So to me, growth is always a question of remixing, and moving into higher value areas. What to watch is the growth in those high value spaces.

One of those areas of growth obviously is Watson. Watson made its public debut on Jeopardy! At what point did you decide and see that this was a big opportunity, that this is something that you wanted to place one of those big bets on?

I remember driving home that night, from the day Watson did that sort of vignette on Jeopardy!, which was a pretty bold move because obviously when you do something like that on TV . . . we agreed to do that long before it aired, right? So Watson had a lot of work to do to get ready for his big debut on television.

And I remember coming home and, on the phone, saying to my husband, “I think I just witnessed some piece of history.” It was really then I knew we had something—that this would be an era unlike any eras before it. Very simply put, the eras before had the very simplest machines. They did counting. Everything we know today is programmed—if this, do that. You tell it what to do. It may do it very fast. But it has to be programmed.

Watson is a system that reasons and learns. That is very different. It is going to be essential for the decade ahead because the amount of information is overwhelming. You will be unable to deal with it.

The ability to reinvent industries, professions—that is [now] all in front of every one of us. It’ll put a premium on things like education, science, technology. It won’t matter what your job is. everyone is going to have sort of a silver thread of having to understand how to apply data and analytics and technology in their job. What great opportunity comes out of that, both for my company and, I think, everyone’s company.

You mentioned that every CEO prior to you has left the company in a better position. What’s the biggest challenge for you to be able to do that during your tenure?

I think the biggest challenge, given the sets of shifts out in the industry today, is the speed at which they’re happening. And I think it applies not only to me as the CEO of IBM, but the CEO of any company out there today.

This change is happening faster than it has ever happened before, and so it does put a premium on speed, and speed of change, and being bold. And a bit of experimentation. To try things and then course-correct along the way.

That’s what the team is very focused on: the three initiatives, but then the speed of movement across those.

5 things you didn’t know about IBM and Ginni Rometty

IBM CEO Ginni Rometty has three rules she follows in her goal to take the old-school company through a massive cultural transformation: 1) Don’t protect the past, 2) Never be defined by your product and 3) Always transform yourself. In Fortune’s October 6th issue, Senior Writer Michal Lev-Ram explores how despite IBM’s revenues shrinking nine quarters in a row now, nearly everyone agrees that Rometty is the right leader for the company. “She has this unique ability to make you comfortable in the change while still being uncomfortable,” says John Kelly, senior vice president of IBM Research. “It’s really hard to describe.” Her plan? Get IBM’s massive employee base to move faster than ever and invest in high-growth area like mobile, cloud and big data analytics.

During the reporting process, Lev-Ram learned loads about IBM and Rometty. Here are 5 interesting points that were left out of her feature:

1. IBM has a lot of old blood. But in April 2014 Rometty brought in some fresh talent: Ken Keverian, now SVP of corporate strategy at Big Blue, is a highly respected former senior partner from the Boston Consulting Group. In his new role, he is tasked with “developing strategies that are linked to execution plans for a new era of computing, new markets and new clients.” That’s a whole lot of newness in a company whose executive team has gone largely unchanged in recent years.

2. Rometty got “help” from other powerful women. It may be ancient history, but Rometty’s successful integration of PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting back in 2002 (which played a big role in her eventual ascent to the top job at IBM) was set in motion by Carly Fiorina, then CEO of Hewlett-Packard. Fiorina blundered her own attempted acquisition of the large consulting group, but it paved the way for Rometty to snap up and assimilate PwC. The rest really is history—IBM’s $57 billion global services unit is now its biggest revenue generator.

3. Rometty’s Watson love runs deep. On the day the computing system beat its opponents on Jeopardy! (back in 2011), she knew the technology could play a big part in IBM’s future. “I remember coming home and saying to my husband, ‘I think I just witnessed some piece of history,'” she told Fortune. “It was then that I knew we had something, that this would be an era unlike any eras before it.” Of course, Watson’s ultimate success is still TBD, but Rometty has followed through her commitment to the uber-smart system with a $1 billion investment towards development and commercialization.

4. Rometty has long viewed Africa as the next frontier. Back in 2011, as SVP in charge of corporate strategy, she commissioned a team of 20 company leaders to spend several months devising a plan for IBM’s growth on the continent. In addition to opening up a research center in Nairobi, this year alone Rometty has spent about three weeks in Africa. She also announced a $100 million investment, called Project Lucy, to bring Watson to Africa.”She spends a lot of time on the ground there, several times a year,” says Jonathan Berman, an expert on doing business in Africa. “That’s a lot for a leader of a Fortune 100 company.”

5. “Brain-like” chips could be the future. In addition to continuing efforts on Watson and cloud computing, IBM’s 3,000 researchers are working on a wide variety of projects. “Brain-like” chips that can process multiple sensory inputs, a new class of polymers that are stronger than bone and completely recyclable, and sequencing and deciphering the genetic code of the cacao plant.